Nim Nuggets: Nim talk at Strange Loop 2021

[Walter Bright]

On 10/16/2021 11:05 PM, Paulo Pinto wrote:
> On Sunday, 17 October 2021 at 04:17:38 UTC, jfondren wrote:
>> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d2VRuZo2pdA
>>
>> About 50% of it is inadvertent praise for D. The rest is ARC and C++ interop.
> 
> If you mean compile time evaluation, D wasn't the first with such features and 
> it is quite far from what Common Lisp is capable of.

Lisp is fundamentally different. It started out as an interpreter and later 
added native code generation. There never really was a difference between 
compile time and runtime for Lisp.

Nobody even thought of compile time function evaluation for C and C++ until D 
did it.

Nobody.

As evidence, when people discovered that C++ templates could be used to evaluate 
things at compile time, everyone was completely agog over it. I never heard 
*anyone* suggest that maybe ordinary functions could do this, too.

Now everyone does it. Even C is considering adding it.